By Ian Hall
We’re all writers.
Whether it’s a letter, an email, poetry or stories. Even if we never put pen to paper, or our fingertips to a keyboard, in our imagination we write the novel that is our lives, or what we’d like our lives to be. We wonder ‘what if’s’ and ponder possibilities of ‘going back and doing it differently.’
Some people dabble, and scribble through their ‘writing lives’ with nothing much to show; their emails are eloquent, punctuated and great to read, but there it ends. Some have such interests and pastimes that drive them to inspire others, to pass on to generations to come. I belong to my last category; the writers who have an unnatural urge to write, to create, to indulge their fantasies (or egos) and feel they are at their best when in front of a quickly filling page.
We’re all writers, but there are many different ways to write.
Some begin with an idea, growing it like a rolling snowball into a concept, then they mold a leading character, and plan the novel to the last page.
Some sow a novel into a formula, threading their story into a pre-arranged tapestry, and have the restraints of length, content, history and form.
Some throw those constraints to the wind, diving deep into foreign cities, alien worlds, or unknown futures, limited by nothing except their own imaginations, and the results are both weird and wonderful.
I am not any of the above.
I begin each story on a blank page, with no preconceived notions, no plan and no direction. My characters emerge on the page as they would in a movie, hidden from the viewer until they appear. I have started many short stories, and completed quite a few. Some have been well accepted, some even won prizes. But the best of them never stayed as short stories.
The best of them (in my own humble opinion, of course) only started life as short stories, then, sometimes weeks later, as my pen began the next idea, an unseen title appears at the top of the page; “Chapter Two.”
I have begun five novels from the same humble beginnings. A short story is the basis, but it soon becomes a novel as the possibilities shift and morph.
So, in closing, remember – we are all writers.
Never limit yourself, never give up, and never think anything is beyond you.
It’s not.
And if you finish a story, with the glorious final full stop, pause, and give it a afterthought…… what happens next? You never know; it may turn into a novel.
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